Curating a Digital Project Using Omeka: Getting Started

From Omeka Site Planning Tips:

1. What are the primary goals of the website?

2. Who is the primary audience of this website? Secondary audiences?

• What do you want these specific audiences to accomplish when they come to the site?

• What content/actions do you want to prioritize?

   

3. What sections will this website include?

• Typical top level navigation and sections for a typical Omeka site include:

• Items: (renamed however you would like Archive/Sources/Objects) links to a browseable list of items, sortable by type of item and tags.

• Collections (renamed however you would like): groups of items, public can dig through collection to find items.

• Exhibits: (renamed however you would like): Exhibits contain interpretative text and rely on items/sources/objects as their building blocks.

• About-- a simple page good for publishing project descriptions, credits, rights, et al

• Keyword Search box –option to link to advanced search page

   

What kind of functionality do you need to manage the collection? These plugins may be useful to install:

• Dublin Core Extended - provides additional fields (metadata elements) for describing items
  
• SimpleVocab - define a controlled vocabulary for any field
  
• Library of Congress Suggest - adds an auto-complete feature to metadata fields to pull results from LOC's controlled vocabularies
  
• TagBandit - assign tags to a group of items
  
• Geolocation - add geolocation data for items
• CollectionTree - allows you to nest collections
  

What features would you like to build into the online experience for users? These plugins (and others) may be useful to install:

• COins - embeds citation metadata for each item so that users can add metadata to citation tools like Zotero
  
• Commenting - allows for users to comment on the site and administrators to moderate comments
  
• Contribution - collect stories, images, or other files from the public to add to the collection
  
• ExhibitBuilder - develop web pages that showcase objects with narrative text
  
• SimplePages - add web pages to the Omeka site
  
• Social Bookmarking - adds social bookmarking features
  
• Bar Code and Reports - create QR codes for items (can be used in conjunction with physical exhibit)

Read the User Guide for Scholars for more step-by-step instructions on setting up Omeka.